Sailing Away

Conditions: Apocalyptic

Film Review: Passengers

It goes to show how little you should pay attention to rumours.  I'd heard basically two things about this movie before seeing it.  One, it's really awful.  And two, there's a big twist at the end that screws up everything.  So I went it to this with a fairly healthy dose of skepticism.  It turns out what I had heard was complete bullshit.  One, this is actually a really good film, and two, there's no twist at all.  Spoilers ahead.

Passengers, for those who've not seen the trailer, is about Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence waking up prematurely on a giant spaceship as it takes them to another planet.  No one else is awake, and they don't know what to do.  They can't go back to sleep, and the can't get into the cockpit, or talk to the sleeping crew, or even (due to the distances involved) talk to earth.  The kicker is that there's still 90 years to go.  The ship's systems are working, so they have food, and as the ship is set to allow all the passengers to be woken a few months before it arrives, it's fully equipped with hotel rooms, movie theaters, observation decks, a swimming pool, and crucially for the plot, a bar with a robot barman (played well by Michael Sheen).  So they're faced with basically having to live out the rest of their lives in a luxurious prison.

Ok, that's an interesting premise.  But what transports this into something good is Pratt's character.  See, the malfunction caused only him to be woken up.  And for a year he roamed about the ship, alone, going slowly mad.  He falls in love with Lawrence and reads up everything he can about her, before finally making the awful decision to sabotage her pod so that she'll be with him.  It's a totally selfish and terrible decision, and you can see Pratt, so used to portraying easy going characters, struggling to show how tormented he must be to make this decision.  Once she is awake and has adapted to the situation of being stuck on this ship for the rest of her life, she falls in love with him and they begin a romantic relationship.  And so in this strange place the two have found each other.  But of course, that terrible secret hangs over us all.  Eventually she finds out, thanks to the robot, and everything goes wrong.  Understandably, she hates his guts, and is desolate over essentially losing her life.

The third act arrives with the ship, always a bit dodgy, finally really starting to break down.  A new character, played by Lawrence Fishburne, suddenly appears, essentially as a Deus Ex Machina.  He's a member of the crew, awaken presumably by the ship and capable of entering the engineering sections and the cockpit to examine what's going on.  He then conveniently dies, giving Pratt and Lawrence a chance to fix the ship and their relationship, as they have to work together to save the ship and themselves.  Pratt is forced to sacrifice himself to stop an explosion, and Lawrence risks all to save him.  After everything we've gone through it's actually a very nail biting and effective sequence.

Does Pratt redeem himself by his sacrifice?  Does the fact it needed both of them to save the ship mitigate his decision to wake Lawrence up?  These are difficult questions to answer, and I'm glad we have a blockbuster film asking them.  Perhaps it could have been a more intensive psychological thriller, but then again it could have been even more geeky about explaining how the ships systems work.  It works at a human level, and both of the actors deliver terrific performances.  Ultimately this film is about an unlikely and tumultuous relationship, in an unlikely and theatrical setting.  I think it works very well.  Four robot bartenders out of five.